2020Q1 Reports: Office

Priscilla Rasmussen

Winter 2020 Executive Board Meeting

26 February 2020

ACL Business Office Report

Even with the addition of an extra part-time staff person, the Office is becoming busier than in past years for each conference’s planning, organizing, onsite management and especially lately, post-conference financial wrap-ups. With the usual student travel and SRW awards and volunteers refunds we have always made, we now have WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) travel awards which, all combined, totaled in the hundreds this past year. And, these days, checks are not accepted or carry huge cashing fees in most countries outside the United States. This means relying much more heavily on making wire transfers for both the smaller travel awards and the quite large venue and catering conference expenses. I have worked with the bank to raise my wire transfer limit to $50,000 and this helps but it is still very time consuming to get the correct and complete information from the awardees. I am working with the WiNLP and D&I organizers so that they will get this information when making the awards and be able to pass the information on to me to hopefully ease this process.

Having passed the audit with flying colors once again in November 2019, the auditors and I had discussed moving to Quickbooks as our Office accounting system and also possibly moving to a US-based accounting firm to compile our reporting and IRS filing requirements. David and I recently had a lengthy conference call with our auditors where we discussed possibly hiring them as our accountants since they are nearby in New Jersey (where ACL is incorporated) and hiring a different auditor since they could not do both. The current auditors are now preparing a proposal for them to move into the accountant role. David will probably speak more on this topic. What this means for the Office is that I have enrolled both Pat and myself in introductory and intermediary Quickbooks courses in preparation for a very positive but large, time consuming change in how our financials are recorded and managed. This should also help save time in the long run by automating check and wire payments. After talking with the auditors and getting their description of what Quickbooks can do, I am now thinking there may be a way to coordinate input of all online conference registration payments directly into Quickbooks, making for more timely accounting of income and expenses generated by each conference.

Pat Kirby continues to be an indispensable assistant to me in our daily office operations (especially handling most of the membership entries into the portal), managing all conference registrations as well as managing the conference student housing and working with me in preparation for and onsite at our conferences. She continues to do more of the expenditure and monthly bank statement reconciliations. Cathy Magnusson, my more part-time second assistant, continues communicating with the sponsors and exhibitors (who take a lot of our time and have lots of questions), and works with Pat in sending out participant receipts and invoices, allowing more time for Pat to focus on the financials. Cathy has been following up on sponsorship delinquent payments and onsite registrations that are declined or invalid and is doing a great job in financial recovery. And, with the tremendous growth of our conferences, we have been overrun with requests for invoices and more proper receipts. I asked the registration form builders to make a receipt on our letterhead to hopefully satisfy these requests which they did but people are still not happy. I am hoping Nitin may be able to help come up with an automated application process for these, too, where people can specify what they need the receipts/invoices to state.

For the ACL initiatives on anti-harassment and diversity & inclusion (D&I), we have continued to include most items requested to be included on the registration form, with a few refinements as we learned what worked best: 1) put an anti-harassment checkbox directly on the registration forms, just above the payment options, which prevents people from completing their registration until they check the box saying that they have read and agree to abide by our policy (and there is a link to the policy itself) and 2) incorporating suggestions coming from the D&I committee such as adding a nickname field, adding pronoun question, adding/adjusting gender questions, adding childcare and travel assistance questions and links, adjusting the dietary restriction/preference question, adding mentoring options, and adding a question of whether a person needs assistance of any kind. The anti-harassment effort is working quite well. For the D&I initiative, the highly successful mentoring and childcare options have been included for all 2019 conferences as well as the question about needing assistance, etc. So, overall, some very good and well received initiatives resulted from the D&I efforts in 2019 which we intend to continue in 2020 and the dedication shown by the committee and its leaders was and is impressive.

My hope is that by making the above suggested financials and staffing adjustments we will be better equipped to handle the ever-increasing numbers of conference attendees and there will be more time for me to offer the always-called-upon advice, attend and organize meetings, identify and pre-negotiate future conference venues, conduct site visits, pre-negotiate catering/av/social event and other contracts, develop working budgets, review bids, make initial approaches to potential sponsors, oversee Office operations, etc. The difficulty in hiring additional staff is that there is not enough work in the Office to keep even one person (Pat) occupied 4-5 part-time days a week in December, January and February. It is not until conference “season” is in full swing that we grow from needing one full-time person to needing up to 3-4 close to full-time people. Very cyclical employees are difficult to find and/or retain. But, I am beginning to formulate some ideas which may include engaging a Professional Conference Organizer (PCO) to work on all conferences to greater and lesser extent, as needed. After I am able to discuss this idea and expand it into something more complete that I can propose, I will come back to this.

Publications, Journals and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates handling print-on-demand of our publications, I typically receive no requests for hardcopy publications in the office.

The Curran Associates agreement has been good for both them and the ACL. In the last half of 2019, we have received $1,153.90.

MIT Press Journals sent two invoices in September for their fiscal year, July 2018 - June 2019, for their services related to the Computational Linguistics (CL) and TACL Journals. The CL invoice was for a total of $40,120.07 and the TACL invoice was for $34,362.42.

Our journals pay editorial assistants to help with the process. The CL Journal’s assistant was paid $508.00 for her services for the 3rd and 4th quarters of the 2019. The TACL Journal’s assistant was paid $6,123.68 covering the 2nd and $6,546.65 covering the 3rd quarters of 2019.

Membership:

For the previous report, I was pleased to say that we had 4,172 members at the end of the CY 2018 year but the even better news is that we finished CY 2019 with 5,145 members. This is higher than my end-of-year prediction of between 4,500 and 4.800 members. It indicates the continuing growth of our field and conferences...Only two years ago, membership was under 3,000. The distribution of countries represented and numbers from each country fluctuate each year depending upon the area of the world our conferences are held, although we seem to be representing around 70 countries on a regular basis. Countries represented at year-end of 2019 are 78, reflecting the WiNLP and Diversity & Inclusion outreach efforts. Please refer to the Membership Report and Members By Country report for full details.

File:Memberships-2019-by-country-FULL.xlsx

File:Membership-report-2010-2019-FULL YEARS-Statistics.xlsx

We began 2019 with 94 members who were in a multi-year membership and about 274 members renewed on their own. As is becoming more standard, most memberships come from conference registrations. The NAACL 2019 attendees’ registrations included 1,268 new and renewing memberships, ACL 2019 resulted in 2,316 memberships, and EMNLP 2019 resulted in 1,193 memberships, especially from the Asian communities. Between the growth in overall memberships and the increased number resulting from conference registrations, the portal’s automated input process seems to be working well and allows us to keep up with memberships very easily and quickly and have more time for other endeavors.

Occasionally inquiries come to the Office about what the benefits of ACL membership are and whether a particular country qualifies for the hard currency discount. It would be good to 1) update and more prominently post member benefits at the portal and 2) annually update the countries qualifying for hard currency discounts. I would also recommend making the location for posting job announcement more prominent at the portal. It currently resides within the wiki as “Employment opportunities, postdoctoral positions, summer jobs” which is harder for people to find and there is much confusion as people want and prefer to post their job announcements under conference events instead.

Fellows Program:

The only involvement the Office now has in the Fellowship nomination and selection process is to verify nominated members’ eligibility according to our new policy for future years.

Conferences:

NAACL 2019 was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Minneapolis, June 2-7. The final number of attendees was 1,635 after removing all cancellations and unpaid no-shows, which is a record of over 300 more attendees than the record set in 2018. This year we continued the successful innovations of adding both an Industrial (parallel) Track and holding the poster sessions in parallel with the other main conference sessions as well as lowering the food/beverage orders by 1/3 to keep costs down and avoid wasting leftover food. Many innovations suggested by the D&I Committee were implemented. A few were not so successful and others were standout winners. For NAACLs (and possibly other conferences) in the future, it is advisable to continue with the lower food amounts, parallel Industry Track (NAACLs) and poster sessions and the more successful D&I initiatives (mentoring, nicknames, childcare, accessibility/assistance, better food labeling and attention to dietary needs, travel assistance when/if possible financially, new to ACL/I am Hiring/ I am looking for Employment/etc stickers for badges, quiet/prayer/mothers/childcare rooms, gender neutral bathroom, etc.). The hotel changed audio visual companies in January just before our meeting, replacing PSAV (the company I used for many years with great success) with Encore, who seemed fine contractually honoring the previously entered into PSAV contract and in planning emails and phone calls. However, onsite, Encore was less than competent in many ways. Encore is a company to be wary of or avoided in the future. The Social Event at the Minneapolis Institute of Art was a great success, with the themed food stations offered to compliment the subject matter in the various galleries. However, the failure of the Recruitment Lunch was a surprise. Although over 500 people signed up on their registration forms to attend the lunch, we expected 400 students and up to 20 recruiters. About 14-16 recruiters showed up, representing 7 companies but only about 50 students showed up. No one came to the registration desk asking about the Lunch and it seemed to be out of everyone’s mind and attendees did not seem to miss not attending this event. The lesson learned is to be very careful that this is well advertised if we are to continue offering these lunches and to evaluate whether it is useful to continue.

ACL 2019 was very successful, with 3,283 people registered and attending. This is more than double ACL 2018 and 44% more than ACL 2017 final numbers. Between the Local Arrangements Chairs, the PCO, the Local Sponsorship Chairs, and myself, we communicated on a regular basis, especially regarding sponsors and exhibitors, registration, venue setup and other key policy questions and this has been extraordinarily important with the increased conference size. It was decided not to include a Recruitment Lunch and no one seemed to miss it or inquire about having one. We were quite fortunate to have an excellent PCO guiding the physical setup, catering and av of the venue as well as assisting with the other logistics. Having 32 or more exhibitors adds an entire extra level of work for the PCO but I might recommend not making full exhibit booth builds in the future. They are costly and more demanding both to satisfy each exhibitor and in having enough space. Exhibitors can easily rent their own exhibit furniture and setup as is done at NAACLs. Many thanks must be given to the Local Arrangements team who scrambled more than once to revise the venue space and usage to accommodate the ever increasing registration predictions. Having worked closely with this particular PCO and knowing they are a part of 50-60 offices worldwide, I would strongly recommend using them again.

EMNLP 2019 was also very successful, especially given the social unrest in downtown Hong Kong. We only had one person cancel attendance specifically due to the unrest but we, as the organizing committee, worried about attendance, making appropriate final confirmations to hotels, conference venue and social event venue and posting updates for participants to assure them of the safety in coming to the conference. In the end, with 1938 attendees, the conference was a success and ran smoothly. Possibly making better use of the very large space available for the poster sessions and catered lunches would be something to keep in mind for the future but, otherwise, the space was more than adequate. And, while it was expensive for our budgeting, people seemed to very much enjoy the social event at Disneyland Hong Kong and there were few other options without going downtown where the unrest might have been problematic.

Given the current concerns about possible travel restrictions going into the future, it may be interesting to note that NAACL 2019, with 1635 registrations, had 13 cancellations specifically due to visas being denied compared to NAACL 2018 which had 8 cancellations out of 1322 registrations. There were many more cancellations, due to illness and work obligations, but these numbers represent the ones that were identified as being specifically visa issues. There are no records kept or requested of authors who did not register and could not attend due to visa problems. Comparing the NAACL experience to ACL 2019 in Italy, with almost double the registrations at 3283, for ACL 2019 there were 49 cancellations specifically due to visa denials. And, for EMNLP 2019, with 27 cancellations due to visa denials and 1939 total registrations, it seems that there are more issues of visa denials elsewhere than with NAACL conferences.

While it is always difficult to project attendance at conferences, we now face the difficulty of having to negotiate and enter into venue contracts at least two years in advance but cannot predict whether our conferences will continue to grow substantially or if the numbers will level out. This has implications in how much space we contract and, if too much, be locked into space we may not need at a convention center with very high costs. Also, whatever space is contracted for a particular conference tends to lock the Program Chairs into presenting the posters in a certain way and removes their flexibility in planning the program (for example, they could not revert to evening poster sessions with dinners because that type of meeting space might not be available once the contract is set with meeting space to accommodate daytime parallel poster sessions).

Workshops continue to be more challenging in finding adequate space for the growing attendance at some workshops plus the many poster sessions they plan to present. Careful advance planning is essential for these events.

ACL 2020 in Seattle is shaping up nicely, with a very dedicated group of organizers working tirelessly to get quotes for various things (video recording, childcare, and many other aspects of the meeting) and the Office is offering advice as well as acting as Local Arrangements Chair. As such, the PSAV audio/visual quotation should be submitted to me within the next few days; PSAV has already given a one-day total price for the six days of conference internet; food and beverage estimates cannot be done until the hotel produces their spring/summer menu in the next couple of weeks; and other contracting/negotiating is underway (poster board rentals, etc.). With these quotes and estimations I can make, coupled with the quotes the other Organizers are receiving, I plan to create a working budget to set registration fees in the later half of March and open registration in early April. The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPop) will be the social event venue and it is a great, fun experience which we hope people will enjoy.

EMNLP 2020 planning is underway, led by Bonnie Webber. This will be our first experiment with holding a conference at an all-inclusive resort and the contract has been signed for this. The Barcelo Bavaro Resort in Punta Cana offers many day and night activities and plenty of all-you-can-eat restaurants as well as more upscale dining and, of course, lovely beaches and pools. The meeting space is quite nice and large enough to accommodate our expected attendance of up to 2000 or more. The tricky part is encouraging everyone to stay onsite at the resort to avoid awkward and complicated local travel, onsite dining and resort entrance. Planning is in the early stages but everyone staying at the resort should have a wonderful experience.

Conference Sponsorship:

ACL 2019 had the high level of sponsorship commitments of $399,505 from 40 sponsors through the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC). Our faithful sponsors (Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Bloomberg, ByteDance, ebay, Facebook, Deep Mind/Google, Google, Grammarly, Huawei/Noah's Ark Lab, IBM Research, Megagon Labs, Microsoft, NAVER Labs, Tencent, Yandex) plus sponsors we have not seen before or are returning (Almaware, ASAPP, Babelscape, BBN, BMW, Bosch, Cisco, DiDi Research, Duolingo, Expert System Iberia, G-Research, ISI, Jingdong, PolyAI, SAP, Salesforce, Shannon AI, Verisk) continue to help us thrive. There were also companies supporting individual workshops: WiNLP with 14 sponsors for $71,426, BEA Workshop for $2,350, Blackbox Workshop for $5,000, the ArgMining Workshop for $500, the Workshop on Detecting Abusive Language for $6,750, the Rep4NLP Workshop for $5,262, TYP-NLP Workshop for $500 and SIGMORPHON for $1,000 in total contributions.

EMNLP 2019 received $208,796 in sponsorships. Many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as were listed in the Summer Office Report for EMNLP and above generously donated. This also includes $16,500 sponsoring specific workshops.

NAACL 2019 received a total of $163,193 in main conference commitments. As with ACL and EMNLP 2019, many were the result of 2-Pack or 3-Pack sponsorship agreements so many of the same companies as listed above generously donated. Additionally, a total of $32,784 workshop-specific donations were made to various workshops.

The idea of offering 2-Pack or 3-Pack options and including EMNLP allows sponsors to make one payment to support two or all three events rather than one at a time. This has made sponsoring easier, especially for our ongoing sponsors. For the 2020 Sponsorship Booklet we continue to offer these multi-pack options including AACL 2020, ACL 2020, and EMNLP 2020, which will hopefully result in some first-time as well as repeating commitments and sometimes at higher levels. With the new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) initiative continuing since NAACL 2019, we kept and updated the section giving options to sponsor this. The D&I includes Accessibility (for mobility, hearing and visually impaired), Childcare, Travel Assistance, Mentoring, etc. While we have accommodated an individual who requested accessibility assistance in the past, it is a positive step to more clearly and openly offer such assistance.

For 2020, we are just beginning to receive firm commitments from companies. So far, AACL 2020 has received $10,180 from 2 sponsors and 1 exhibitor; ACL has received $123,198 from 9 sponsors and 1 exhibitor, $37,500 for WiNLP and $3,500 for other workshops. EMNLP 2020 has received $83,617 from 7 sponsors and 1 exhibitor plus $5,000 toward various workshops. Most companies need to get management approvals and most Asian companies require formal agreements before firm commitments can be made so we are in the process of building our sponsorship base for each conference now.

I believe an idea was floated at one of the last couple of Executive meetings to consider appointing an overall Sponsorship Chair, along the lines of Nitin’s and Matt’s roles. This may be a good idea. As I understand and remember, the International Sponsorship Committee (ISC) was established back around 2012 by Owen Rambow and others as a way of “standardizing” our requests for sponsorships from the various companies. It had been thee case that different conferences were setting their own rates and companies were being approached by multiple people, each representing their own conference and with very different requests and promises. So, the annually updated sponsorship booklet was created and, each year, the conferences of that year were included, allowing a company to support 1, 2, or 3 conferences (multiples becoming package deals). ACL, EACL when it takes place, EMNLP and NAACL when it takes place have all been represented. So, for 2020, I had included AACL, ACL and EMNLP as the conferences to share in the ISC efforts. Perhaps AACL was unaware of this sponsorship arrangement and have created their own sponsorship levels/pricing, although requests for Asian & Pacific Rim Co-Chairs had been sent. Possibly having an Executive Board approved Sponsorship Coordinating Chair would not only help with consistency but may also have better insight into new or different companies to approach.